Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (review)

This book is the latest in a quite respectable series which, it is claimed, is dedicated to innovative and provocative work on technologies in areas such as cybernetics, nanotechnology, genetics, and medical advances. The focus of the series is, though, directed towards studies in culture and theory. One of the earlier tomes in the series by Joanna Zylinska, entitled "The Cyborg Experiments" really is an authoritative work, looking into how new technologies affect our concepts of identity and embodiment, and hence when I was asked to review the latest in the series I was suitably excited about the prospect.

The aim of the text seems clear and promising: it is subtitled "A History of Visual Technologies," the author is billed as an Associate Professor in Visual Arts, and the jacket tells us that the book is a "significant contribution to the study of visual culture and the technologies that mediate it." Chapter headings such as "Beyond the Cyborg" and "Unorthodox Time Machines" further whet the appetite. When coupled with an illustration of one of my scientific heroes, Robert Hooke, in his 1694 Picture Box, the foundation was there for an invigorating discussion of cybernetics.

However, the book fails in these aims, and furthermore fails to be innovative and provocative, as it promises. Indeed, rather than being innovative, the book is a dated history, out of touch with recent thinking. So no discussion on artificial retinas, for example, giving sight to the blind, or on Philip Kennedy's neural transmitter, allowing individuals to control a computer by thought signals alone.

Quite a number of the book's sub-headings are exciting and appealing. For example, "The Cybernetics of Extended Mental Systems and Ideas" or "Toward a New Laboratory of the Senses and Model of the Human/Machine Interface" promise to discuss my own research area, implants linking human and machine brains and increasing the range of human senses. I hoped we would hear about extending an individual's nervous system over the internet, so that their brain can control a remote prosthesis, or allowing a human to have extra senses, for which direct ultrasonic perception has been shown to be successful, or even the potential for thought communication, direct communication between linked human nervous systems having been achieved already.

What we actually got was an extended discourse on Niepce's heliograph and Edison's cylinder phonograph: no implants and no Cyborg research. Furthermore, as with the rest of the book, the language is unnecessarily complex, relying on unfathomable jargon, which, even as a Professor of Cybernetics, I found difficult to understand. For example, Tomas writes about "perceptual thresholds that are positioned beyond the present, in between past and future. Each of these thresholds leads into a subterranean world" (195). The first sentence makes little sense, timewise. The second sentence leads me to believe that far from having extra senses, we are looking to replace our senses with those of a mole. Individual words make little sense either: I'm still not sure what "proto-cybernetic nature" means, never mind "tactilo-ecolographic logic." But there again, maybe it's due to the "technology-mediated mental systems that lie outside of conventional cybernetic and cyborgian representation" (158).

A section on "the supersensual" seems to be talking about nothing more than how our brain is affected by the sort of measurements we can obtain with technology that we can't yet naturally obtain as humans—X-Ray machines or the speedometer in a car—rather than feeding signals directly into the brain.

In Chapter 5, entitled "Alternate Models of the Virtual," we obtain an extended discussion on the University of Utah 1968 head-mounted display as a perspective aid, for the user to witness the image presented to them as well as that normally viewed, rather like Hooke's camera. Essentially this was one of the first prototype virtual reality systems. There follows an interesting discussion on the user's tension between the two worlds they face, in...